Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The Final Countdown

For a lot of you, of course, this would mean the countdown to Christmas and the deadline for all the Christmas knitting. But for me, it’s a much sooner countdown; the countdown to the wedding, which is now less than a month away (for the first one, at least). It’s been going full force at the Ali-Barnard household (soon to be the Ali household) to get everything done. Most things are being done jointly; we’re both making all the invitations by hand and making sure that the right invitations get sent to the right people at the right address for the right event, Nyron’s driving me around to meet up with his mom for dress-fittings and such, and we’re both trying to find some cuddle-time in and amongst all this. But some things are all me, and that’s the knitting.

Knitting the wedding flowers has been a huge undertaking. It took me over a month just to make all the corsages and boutonnieres, which are made using the Cabbage Rose pattern (for the corsages) and the American Beauty Rose (for the boutonnieres) from Nicky Epstein’s Knitting Flowers and 3 of the small leaves on each.

Corsages

Boutinneires

I’m now trying to do a bouquet for each of my bridesmaids and one for myself. The bouquets are a mix of the 2 flower patterns, each with 2 of the small leaves and a 5-stitch i-cord stem (35 stitches long). I can make about 2 in a day on my way to and from work, so they’re coming along, but I have to decide how I’m going to wrap them. I’d thought about the idea of doing a filet crochet wrap for at least mine using a rose pattern that was my great-grandmother’s signature pattern. I’m still holding out hope for this idea but I don’t know if I’ll get it done on time, not least because I’ve never done filet crochet before and I’m not as experienced with crochet in general as I am with knitting. We’ll see. For at least the bridesmaids’ (and for mine if I don’t get the crochet done) I have some fabric that I bought in my wedding colours to pass around to my bridesmaids to help them find their dresses, so I’ll cut that into strips and use them to wrap the bouquets together.

I’ve just started spinning the yarn for my garter, as well. I’m pretty sure I’m going to use the pattern in the Spring 2008 issue of Spin-off. I’ve drafted it super thin and it’s coming out quite nice. It’s still not as even as I’d like it to be, but I’m getting better. I’d love to take the spinning workshop in Haliburton, but each level is a week of full-day classes, so I doubt I can get the time off work for that.

The reason for the long blog absence (and this ungodly long entry) is that my brother Tim and his girlfriend Ally were visiting all last week. It’s always fun to have Tim visit and I’m really glad Ally could come, too, not only because she keeps Tim entertained while I’m at work. Ally’s the one who asked me to knit the dog sweaters for her and her siblings’ dogs. Apparently, she got a luke warm reaction to the idea when she mentioned it to one of her sisters, so she changed her order - which is fine because I was worried about getting such a large order done by Christmas. Instead, she’s now asked for cabled baby scarves for her niece and soon-to-be-born nephew. I sat her down with some of my stitch dictionaries and let her choose the designs for each scarf. I also took her to Lettuce knit so she could pick out the yarn and she made an excellent choice: Blue Sky Alpaca’s Baby Alpaca in a light pink and blue. I’ve always wanted to work with Blue Sky but until now hadn’t had an excuse. These will be much quicker to knit post-wedding than 4 large dog sweaters and will be a welcomed change to knitting a mountain of cotton flowers!